I caught an interesting panel interview on BBC Radio Four this morning between a group of writers chatting about the differences on writing with a pen & paper, and writing direct onto a PC.
Crime writer Robert Rankin was in the corner of the word processor, saying that ever since a child, he’s preferred the look of words on the screen, as they seemed like the typeface of the books he was reading. In short, the technology made him feel like he was actually engaged in the serious process of churning out a novel.
To him, a pen and paper was something that was only to be used in an emergency – when he was stuck in a coffee shop, inspiration struck, and he needs to dash out an idea on the back of a borrowed paper napkin.
I didn’t catch the name of the crime author who was standing in the corner of the humble notepad and pen, but he was very eloquent – far more than I ever could be in a similar situation (not that the BBC would ask a grubby science fiction/fantasy author onto such a show, perish the thought) – and said pensman waxed lyrical about the immediate relationship between ink and paper, with none of the strangely filled out paragraphs and word creep that tend to infect word processed work.
Now, I’ve tried both methods of working in my career. I started out on an old Amstrad word processor, migrated to early Macs (an SE, followed by a Mac II and then Apple’s first laptop – larger than my old typewriter), before moving onto PCs, where the majority of web programming tools tend to reside for the day job.
However, after writing The Court of the Air with a notepad and pen, I now tend to save writing up my novel onto the PC for the last quarter of the year, and have stuck with the old fashioned approach of pen’N’paper ever since. Why? Well, for me, it’s about will power. My PC has the Internet on it and a very good extended interactive thesaurus, and the temptation to play around with wordage is usually more than I can bear.
It starts out, as ‘well, I could just check Wikipedia to see if they have the colour scheme for that hansom cab I’m going to write into chapter seven.’ It’s only research, isn’t it? – but after five hours of FaceBook, Twitter, Bebo, random e-mails, and chat windows appearing on social networks from the readers who have befriended me wanting to know about steammen and why I chose this or that name for an invented technology or race, I suddenly realise that I have blown the best part of the day.
Paper is the ideal way to overcome these base urges for click stimulus – with the added bonus that my trusty reporter’s notepad and uni-ball signo can be easily dragged around to local libraries, museums and coffee shops for that ‘keeping it fresh’ ‘change of scene’ type thang us novelists are prone to. No power sockets needed, no computer crashes, no viruses, no laptop muggings, no soakings from unexpected storms. In the summer, I can even write in the lawns of the many parks that dot London and Madrid without screen-glare!
I’ve spent most of my working career surfing the zeitgeist and at the coalface of the technology race for companies like Apple, so the irony of producing my novels in the most luddite way possible is very appealing indeed.
Stephen Hunt is the best-selling author of fantasy novels for HarperCollins – titles which so far include The Court of the Air, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, and the Rise of the Iron Moon. You can find more on his work at www.StephenHunt.net.
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